Gaussian particle filter based pose and motion estimation

Determination of relative three-dimensional (3D) position, orientation, and relative motion between two reference frames is an important problem in robotic guidance, manipulation, and assembly as well as in other fields such as photogrammetry. A solution to pose and motion estimation problem that uses two-dimensional (2D) intensity images from a single camera is desirable for real-time applications. The difficulty in performing this measurement is that the process of projecting 3D object features to 2D images is a nonlinear transformation. In this paper, the 3D transformation is modeled as a nonlinear stochastic system with the state estimation providing six degrees-of-freedom motion and position values, using line features in image plane as measuring inputs and dual quaternion to represent both rotation and translation in a unified notation. A filtering method called the Gaussian particle filter (GPF) based on the particle filtering concept is presented for 3D pose and motion estimation of a moving target from monocular image sequences. The method has been implemented with simulated data, and simulation results are provided along with comparisons to the extended Kalman filter (EKF) and the unscented Kalman filter (UKF) to show the relative advantages of the GPF. Simulation results showed that GPF is a superior alternative to EKF and UKF.